The adventures of teaching computing science to university students

Aberdeen CityLab!

In the spring Jo Holtan and I got talking about http://citystudiovancouver.com over lunch at the beach in Aberdeen. Matt Lowell had told her about this idea as part of their CycleHack adventure since he’d moved to Vancouver. We thought this would be a good thing to do for our respective institutions: University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh. Some discussion got going in Edinburgh, and I ran with the idea in Aberdeen.

For my part I sounded other people out about the idea to see what they thought of this notion. The idea in a nutshell is this: students work with a team from the local city council to develop sustainable projects, which can be either continued by the city, or which are developed with support and help from a city partner, who then takes over the project. The goal is to have students develop their entrepreneurial and soft-skills in multidisciplinary teams over the academic term.

Everyone I spoke to at the university liked the idea. The next step was to sound out people I knew at the council to see what they thought about it. They also liked it, so I moved onto the next phase of gathering the academics together to see what we could do next. Everyone met each other and we found that we had someone from each college. Wow. That was impressive, and we decided to move forward and to quietly pilot this in the next academic year, and that I should continue discussions with Aberdeen City Council to see what we’d need to do to put it into place.

Over the summer I met with various ACC people and it was run up the rungs to see who could approve this. it got to the Transformation team and stopped. They said “yes, let’s do this.” We met them at the right time as they were looking to bring in university students to help with innovation in the council. Their legal team also saw no problems with the idea either.

Discussions with potential students also went well and thought this would be a good optional course. They could get experience while also developing further skills in team work in a live client situation. Their main concerns were about teamwork, assessments and similar issues.

Our plan to bring this in under the radar haven proven elusive as we couldn’t find a way to do that using any of the current courses on offer a the university. This means we need to start this year with a voluntary scheme, which takes some of the pressure off to have everything ‘just right’, which is part of the reason we wanted to pilot the idea in the first place: so we could learn by doing to uncover the hidden issues of delivering the course.

Further discussions with others experienced in working with councils and governments told me this was also a good idea, which should be pursued too. They also said that we should not look for big, bold ideas either. Within councils things move slowly, so any change for the good, no matter how small is seen as a success. “Judge things by their standards, not by what you would hope to achieve” they said. From within the council they are starting from a different point, than you. I must remember this.

To that end we’ll hopefully be launching this new idea as ‘CityLab!’ in September with a group of volunteer students. To guide the students through the creative process we’ll introduce them to service design and human centered design approaches. And, ‘hey presto’ we’re back in the territory of Snook and Sarah Drummond’s ‘do tank‘ of delivering ideas back upstream to government. 🙂

I’m really excited about this and look forward to see where it goes. There is so much potential here.